


Easy Kill

by KastleInTheSky



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Detective Frank Castle, F/M, Femme Fetale, Miss Punisher Karen Page, Role Reversal, multi-chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-27 02:03:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KastleInTheSky/pseuds/KastleInTheSky
Summary: Frank Castle has investigated every crooked, dark corner of Hell's Kitchen. He's the most decorated detective on the force. And he's no match for the beautiful woman in the black dress and the .380 in her thigh-holster.*AU where Frank is PD looking to take down Karen as the Punisher.





	1. I can picture your face well from the bar in my hotel.

He twirled the picture in his right hand and cradled a melting glass of brandy in the other. On any other day, on a Wednesday afternoon such as this perhaps, Frank would have picked something half as hard and twice as cheap to guzzle into the oncoming night after he clocked out at the precinct, and hotel bars definitely weren’t his thing.

 

As the second-hand on his watch lurked closer and closer to six o’clock, Frank Castle could feel his tightening posterior against the cherry barstool and his cop’s intuition telling him it was getting to be about that time.

 

He looked down at the picture, his mission. A pretty blonde in a tight black number, sunglasses, peacoat smiling across a hotel bar at a grey man in Brook’s Brothers. Her hair fell over only one shoulder, creamy skin peaking out from her collar, deep crimson lips to match, or to clash, Frank wrestled with which was right. Had a voice to match too. He remembered the bugged call, the breathy laugh, the purrs, as he and every detective on his squad listened as they planned their rendezvous.

 

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she’d promised. “You’ll know where to find me.”

 

Frank didn’t know much about this woman or her business, just that the ten men she’d allegedly carted off from this same hotel bar, cleaned their bank accounts bone dry, they must’ve heard the same thing. Frank was here to figure out the “God knows what” that ended the stories about this woman his CO told him. The men who met her in this bar were robbed and never seen again, no trace, barely even a paper trail. Just a giant cash withdrawal and crickets. They didn’t have answers, and this smiling woman, she was the only lead they had.

 

Frank flipped over the picture to where he’d scribble down the information a week ago when he made the call. “Madame X’s Escort Service. 212-555-2811. Ask for Candy.”

 

He turned the picture over again to the Smiling Woman. She wasn’t a Candy, that’s for sure. She looked nothing like any call girl he’d seen either. This looked like a goddam angel, he thought. If he didn’t know any better, he’d fall for it too. He traced his finger over the exposed porcelain of her neck. He’d had a lot of questions: what happened to these men, where is their money, who is Madame X, what really is the nature of her business, these questions were among them. At the forefront, Frank had to ask how a girl like this got caught up with this line of work.

 

“Hey Castle,” said the voice in his ear. “You’re drooling.”

 

The voice was that of his partner, also Frank.

 

“Doin’ no such thing, Foggy,” Frank grumbled, leaning into the miniature microphone under his t-shirt. “Just gettin’ to know the target. First rule of good detective work. ‘Spose you wouldn’t know that, bein’ Frank #2 and all.”

 

“Cute, Castle,” Foggy laughing into Frank’s earpiece. “Hope she likes funny guys.”

 

“Certainly don’t like funny looking guys, or else it would be your ass in this barstool. You got a location on her or what?”

 

“Affirmative,” Foggy replied. “Ramirez has her walking up 10th Ave now, approaching 54th Street. Should be any minute. Would it have killed you to comb your hair, by the way? You’ve been out of the dating game so long, you forgot even that?”

 

Frank looked towards the bar and focused on a slim layer of mirror peeking over the bottles. He hadn’t in fact combed his hair properly before arriving, and he’s been neglecting his beard as well. For as young as he was, too, there was entirely too much grey in there. He looked down at his dress; he wore the t-shirt, an old weathered blue favorite of his, blue favorite jeans as well, ones that looked like they’d spent eleven years on the force as well. He didn’t look anything like Brook’s Brothers. Into his microphone, he let out a deep sigh. He hadn’t tried to impress many ladies since Maria, at least not the kind you should be keeping around, and certainly nothing like this woman in the picture.

 

“Hey, man,” Foggy came back over the earpiece. “I didn’t mean it like, I’m sorry. I… I know it’s not the time for this, exactly, but you’ll get back out there eventually, man, I promise. It’s been over a year, it’s bound to get better soon.”

 

Frank help the picture in his hand and thought about how many he had of Maria, and the kids, all the pictures of them beaming over at him like this woman did to the suit, and all the ones where he beamed back.

 

Still, as he stared at this one, all he could see was this smile, the scarlet outline of the lipstick. He tugged at the hem of his t-shirt.

 

“Shit.”

  
Foggy’s voice brought him back, the shrill, harsh whisper in his hear, sending a chill down his neck and into his sore seat.

 

“What is it, Fog?” Frank whispered. “You got eye’s on her still? Where is she?”

 

As he looked around, he noticed it. The bartender, every other man, every sad sack drinking alone, they were all looking. Frank didn’t read much, but it looked to him like that Medusa thing, how she turned people into stone when she looked at them. That was the look these men had frozen across their face, like they were watching an atomic bomb go off.

 

The cop’s intuition came back, and knowing what must have awaited him, Frank straightened his shoulders and twisted back to look towards the revolving glass entrance of the hotel.

 

An atomic bomb, alright.

 

She looked just like her picture, except the crimson lip she wore bled down all over her dress. Sunglasses covered her eyes and Frank could see her entire pale neck. She had the bellhop in the front frozen in fear as well, and as whispered something to him, the boy’s trembling hand crept slowly up and pointed towards the bar.

 

This woman, whoever she was, “Candy”, glanced quickly over, and just so removed the dark glasses from her face. At this point Frank thought it impossible, but proving him wrong, her crystal blue eyes made her more of a vision than the crummy piece of plastic-paper he’d quickly smashed down into his pocket.

 

She glided towards the bar and, in spite of all the lonely suits, somehow could tell she was meant to float into the cherry stool next to Frank. She flashed him a smile. That smile.

 

“Told you you’d know,” she giggled with the horns of the angels. 


	2. It's just like being alone.

It was supposed to be another mission.

 

_two weeks earlier..._

 

Frank tried not to let it bother him, tried not to stare too intently at the framed photo he kept on his desk. When he worked overtime, his eyes burnt down as to be covered with sandpaper film, he found he could rest them there along the cool plastic covering the faces of Maria, their two children and himself.

 

As such, he tried not to stare at the glowing photo of the smiling woman on the computer. Her teeth were some ungodly white, radiating through the screen, and the sensation, the hushed changes that begun whispering through every riveted capillary, the feeling left him squinting in bewilderment. Perhaps, though, it was only from the light.

 

"You can scroll through, y'know," a woman suggested. 

  

He cricked his neck back suddenly to take in the sight of the precinct captain, Claire Temple, leaning over him, her eyes fixed too on the smiling woman, but the falling and furrowing expression on her face confirmed for Frank that perhaps it _was_ just him.

 

Frank shook the clutter from his head and cooperated as his cheeks flushed with a slight embarrassment. He clicked and he clicked and watched as the woman's image transformed. Sometimes she smiled, sometimes she was only stoic, listening intently as various graying, refined men talked on at her. He had to have clicked through almost a hundred of these pictures, and yet he still didn't understand.

 

"So you think this, this lady is a... murderer?" he asked. "Claire, she doesn't look like she'd know how to twist the nozzle on her pepper spray..."

 

He was met with a sharp, imperative smack to the back of his head, and he felt a sliver of Claire's long nails scratch him.

 

"Doesn't matter what we  _think_ , Castle," Claire hissed as she placed her red hand back down on the desk. "Doesn't matter what she looks like, either. It matters that this woman has consistently been the last person seen with at least nine suspected coin-purses for some of the biggest drug-lords Hell's Kitchens ever seen, and then next thing we know ESU is pulling these guys out of the Hudson."

 

He'd settled to name the looming pit growing in his belly as guilt. He clicked again, and the woman's picture morphed back and forth. From her own, to Maria's, from her, to Maria again and again until Frank resolved to close his eyes. Still the glowing seemed to permeate, to burn hastily through his eyelids, and the portrait of the woman was there again.

 

13 months, he thought. That's how long it'd been since he'd seen Maria, since it was her image so nimbly weaving itself into the back of his eyelids. 13 months, 21 days, about 6 hours at this point. The silent woman was before him now. 

 

13 months, 21 days, 6 hours. Was that long enough.

 

"Frank," Claire whispered again. Frank's eyes shot open. He hadn't even noticed, didn't feel Claire's hand that guided over his to close the browser. He only had a dull blue screen in front of it, but he had the pictures.

 

"Listen," Claire began again, sternly, yet doused with hints of empathy.

 

"I told you, if you needed more time..."

 

Frank sprang up at his boots offended, but after only a millisecond managed to compose himself enough to insist,

"Took my time, ma'am."

 

Claire was as wily as she was assertive, and she was the CO after all. She stood in front of the door before Frank thought he had resolved to leave.

"I know you did," she answered. "And you and I both know that after you sort through all the bullshit from the passed year that you are undoubtedly still the guy for this assignment."

 

Claire sighed, softening a defensive stance, putting one hand to her forehead and the other to her hip. She opened an easy route to the door which Frank declined to take.

 

"It's a lot," Claire admitted. "It is a lot, I know. Especially since we really  _don't_ know what this woman's role in all this shit it. She could be dangerous. She could also just be a hooker with a lot of bad luck." Claire's two hands her at her side now and her gaze confidently in Frank's direction.

 

"You know I wouldn't ask you to do this if I thought it was too much."

 

"Yeah yeah," Frank rasped under his breath, finally making an escape. "I got it. Just let me know when TARU gets the equipment ready and I'll be set to roll out." Frank opened the door and headed straight her his desk, that damn pit of guilt growing as he neared the picture.

 

"That's it?" Claire yelled out from her open office?

 

He declined to answer as before he knew it he was sitting and entranced at the frame again. He watched it that evening, surrounded by the chunky sputtering of the old wooden ceiling fan above him and the bustle of the precinct otherwise alive and well. His partner, Foggy, was seating in the desk next to him, spinning himself around and around in his chair while blathering about his last date with his supposed bombshell lawyer girlfriend. Frank was tuning him out in favor of letting the whirling cricks of the fan and the chair overtake him. He stared at the photo on his desk until the noises became the ticking of the old wooden carousel. Round and round it spun as the chatter in the precinct seem to crescendo and contain the laughter of running children. Frank closed his eyes. 

 

*** 

 

_present_

 

The red and black leathers of her dress and the car seat had finally ended the ugly cacophony created by the two as the car pulled up five or so blocks from the hotel for safe measure. Before she was to exit, the woman pulled a golden compact from her purse to assure the scarlet paint on her lips had smudged at all. In the piercing silence, it had not.

 

She recalled a time she would not have dared to wear red, even black, as she'd felt they'd been too daring, too intense for her cool Springtime skin. She imagined herself now as the Winter and all of its parts. She was the fireplace and the snowstorm, warm, soft, like powder, mesmerizing, just as she was the noxious gas and the numbing cold.

 

And she was certainly fitted for red and black, at least now.

 

As usual, before she could open the door to the car, the woman, also in red, called over to her. This time, her voice was less determined, less certain that it usually was.

  
"You know what to do," she would say, and Karen certainly did, and Karen was certainly very good at it now. It helped to think that they all deserved it.

 

"See what he wants," the woman called this time. The break of routine through Karen off slightly, but her body was now a machine and never faltered even when her thoughts did. She embraced the crisp air and marched in her heels towards the familiar meeting ground of the hotel.

 

It was supposed to be another mission, and she pushed through the revolving door and approached the same awkward bellhop whose name she hadn't bothered to learn, asking for her guest.

 

It was supposed to be another mission, and as the bellhop timidly pointed towards the bar, it seemed so.

 

It was the unfamiliar blood rush, the unrelenting surges through her fingertips, and a warm flash of dark hair that proved her wrong.

 

Karen hadn't been asked to identify her emotions in a very long time. Intrigue? Curiosity? Simply lust?

 

Karen's body still sauntered like a machine, smiled like a machine, sat and removed her jacket like one. The man identified to her as her busy work was unlike what she'd anticipated. He didn't fit it here at all. He was a clean t-shirt, pressed jeans, something of a young adventurous expression across his mouth.

 

Yet his eyes were on fire as were hers.

 

Like the machine she was, she spoke, like her lips couldn't tell this was an ambush.

 


End file.
